Electoral Boundaries

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Electoral Boundaries is a spatial representation of the Commonwealth and State electoral boundaries across Australia defined by the Commonwealth and State/Territory governments respectively. Electoral Boundaries aggregates the representations unique to each jurisdiction into a consistent seamless representation of the electoral boundaries of Australia.

Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Electoral Boundaries product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website (www.geoscape.com.au).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 19 February 2024 with data extracted on 11 February 2024.

  • This release is a full national data population for Version 1.0 of the Electoral Boundaries product, described by the Electoral Boundaries Product Description v1.0.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

Change Notifications

Update of WA State Electoral Boundaries

An update to the Western Australian State Electoral Boundaries has been applied to reflect the redistribution of the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) and Legislative Council (Upper House) boundaries gazetted on 1 December 2023. The boundaries will apply at the State general election due in March 2025.

Due to the reforms enacted by the Constitutional and Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Equality) Act 2021, the entirety of Western Australia will be considered a single electorate (previously 6 electorates) for the purpose of electing 37 members to serve in the Legislative Council at the 2025 State general election. This abolishes the role of the Commissioners in determining boundaries that apply to the election of members of the Legislative Council, along with the requirement that a certain number of Legislative Assembly districts be placed within each Legislative Council region. Geoscape has represented this change by providing a single Legislative Council named ‘LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL’ whose polygons cover the entirety of Western Australia.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues to note.

Resolved Issues

WA State Electoral Multipolygons

4 previously existing (EFFECTIVE_START_DATE = ‘20210313’) Western Australian State Electoral boundary polygons were observed to be multipolygons. These multipolygons have been split into single part polygons and have been assigned new STATE_ELECTORAL_POLYGON_PID values in order to align with the data model.

Known Issues

No known issues to note.

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Annex A – Release Counts

Total Electoral Boundaries counts have been listed in the table below.

TABLE NAME

ACT

NSW

NT

OT

QLD

SA

TAS

VIC

WA

TOTAL

STATE_ELECTORAL

10

188

50

0

182

96

20

192

125

863

STATE_ELECTORAL_POLYGON

10

929

76

0

191

852

1,172

214

6,230

9,674

COMM_ELECTORAL

3

47

2

0

30

10

5

39

15

151

COMM_ELECTORAL_POLYGON

37

273

267

0

40

223

1,971

117

2,612

5,540